An enlightening look at the political foundations of 20th-century hope.
A behind-the-scenes study of Lyndon Baines Johnson’s presidency.
“He was a crass political operator and liberal idealist,” Politico contributing editor Zeitz (Lincoln's Boys: John Hay, John Nicolay, and the War for Lincoln's Image, 2014, etc.) writes about his complex subject, “an unbridled opportunist and steadfast champion of the poor, a southern temporizer and civil rights trailblazer, a progressive hero and bête noire of the antiwar Left.” Beginning with John F. Kennedy’s final days and ending with Richard Nixon’s rise to power, the author embarks on a fine-grained exploration of LBJ’s Great Society. More specifically, Zeitz zeroes in on the many players in LBJ’s administration, including, among many others, Jack Valenti, Horace Busby, Bill Moyers, Walter Heller, Richard Goodwin, and Abe Fortas. The author walks readers through the difficulties Johnson encountered passing the Civil Rights Acts of 1964 and 1966, his notorious “War on Poverty,” the implementation of life-changing initiatives such as Medicare, and the relentless situation in Vietnam. Though it’s easy to remember Johnson as the president who led the war in Vietnam, Zeitz reminds us of many other elements of his presidency, especially his efforts to integrate and end race disputes. In what is an extremely detailed account of a highly controversial presidency—one that attempted to address and resolve issues that are, unfortunately, still around today—the author offers his readers a red flag: we must wake up to the fact that many of today’s significant issues are not new, and we must look to the lessons of the past to continue in the footsteps of all those who have tried so hard to build a better society. “Even as this book goes to print,” writes the author, “the enduring value of the Great Society is no longer an academic question or political talking point but instead a real-world concern.” Refreshingly, the only real change today is that women have come to occupy increasingly influential roles in the administrations that followed.
An enlightening look at the political foundations of 20th-century hope.Pub Date: Feb. 6, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-525-42878-7
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: Oct. 30, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2017
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
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